What's all this about?

Moby-Dick; or, the Whale[1] is a classic work of American literature published in 1851 by Herman Melville. Like most of Melville's novels, Moby-Dick is loosely inspired by his experience on a merchant ship and a whaling voyage as a young adult. It also straddles the line between modernism and postmodernism decades before those literary movements became fashionable. It's funny, romantic, confusing, devastating -- I could go on.

Melville was writing in a strange, pivotal period in American history -- the turning point between Romanticism and realism in the arts, the Industrial Revolution, the chaotic period just before the Civil War -- and he had a unique perspective as someone who was born into genteel society, experienced the complete loss of his family's wealth, and spent some of his most formative years at sea and outside of American society. Despite having some of the expected hangups of a white American man in the early 1800s, Melville's fiction is primarily interested in and empathetic to people on the outskirts, even in his books and stories set firmly in bourgeois society -- which Moby-Dick is not.

Unfortunately, Moby-Dick was not well received by critics or the public when it was first published, and it kneecapped Melville's writing career. Decades later, in the shadow of World War I, modernist writers dug up Melville's work and reappraised it. Later, there were movies, comic books, stage adaptations, and prog rock albums, and Moby-Dick has stayed in the public consciousness ever since. Similarly, I first read Moby-Dick in 2022 through the newsletter Moby Dick Summer, one of the classic lit newsletter projects that popped up in the wake of Dracula Daily, and I've been in love with it since then.

At some point I'm going to write a bunch of little capsule essays about the book's themes and post them here in this shrine. There will also be imgs. Look forward to that!

Where in the world is Ishmael?

Here's some things we know about Ishmael. He has a really mean stepmother and an uncle. He was a school teacher and a merchant sailor. He's from New York. He might have kids, unless his one reference to being a father is metaphorical. Ishmael, I've gotta say, is also kind of a loser. He's reactive and tends to jump to conclusions, but he's also pompously open-minded. He's a Christian. He cares a lot about money and has strong feelings about different species of whale. He kept up his seafaring after the events of this story. He has a compulsive need to be on the ocean.

"Call me Ishmael" is such an iconic opening line because of how much it reveals about the narrator of the book you're about to spend hours and hours with. This is a story that Ishmael is telling, apparently a story he's told before. Someone met him and asked, "So what's your deal?" and regretted it for the rest of the night. There's no way to know whether Ishmael -- a biblical shorthand for an exiled wanderer -- is his real name, but that's how he identifies himself. That's the first thing he wants you to know about him. Ahab is also named after a biblical character, a heretical king. Is that thematic naming convention Melville's choice, or Ishmael's?

The narrative flow of the story Ishmael tells is chaotic and fragmented, almost collage-like. Some Moby-Dick scholars attribute this to the book being two separate drafts that were merged together, while other readers see it as the result of the story overpowering the form: Ahab's monomania for hunting Moby Dick takes over the book the way it takes over the minds of his crew. You could also read the story as a trauma narrative, Ishmael's reconstruction and reinterpretation of what happened to him.

There are two versions of Ishmael: the character and the narrator. Of course, they're the same guy, but the narrator is creating a story out of the series of events as he experienced them years ago. You can only learn about what happened to Ishmael through what he's willing and able to share with you now. The character of Ishmael frequently drops out of the story altogether; there are multiple chapters told from Ahab's perspective or presented in the form of a play. Ishmael doesn't appear in the last twenty or so chapters, only reasserting himself as the first-person narrator in the epilogue -- in which he doesn't even refer to himself by name.[2]

In "Irreconcilable Differences: Voice, Trauma, and Melville's 'Moby-Dick,'" Tara Robbins Fee points out that the moments where Ishmael disappears from the story aren't just random. "The Quarter-Deck" begins a string of chapters written with stage directions, and it's also the point where Ahab reveals his real agenda to the crew. Over the next few chapters, the format becomes more and more scripted and stage-y, until Ishmael breaks back in and announces, "I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine." Fee points out that Ishmael only describes his actions and his response after the crew collectively agrees to hunt down Moby Dick. It wouldn't have changed a thing if he had been an active participant in the scene -- Starbuck fails to challenge Ahab's decision, and Ishmael has a lot less authority than the first mate -- except in Ishmael's own estimation of himself. If Ishmael recognizes himself as part of the mob, one of the voices cheering for Ahab, he implicates himself in the deaths of his crewmates. By taking himself out of the story, he subconsciously acknowledges that he was powerless to stop Ahab and, as well, that he didn't want to try.

The twin traumas of losing his agency to Ahab and surviving the destruction of the Pequod seem to have broken something in Ishmael's psyche, but I'm so curious about what Ishmael was like before the Pequod. The first chapter of the book, "Loomings," is Ishmael's explanation for why he chose to go on a whaling voyage. He talks himself in circles, reiterating in different ways that he had no reason to join the crew of the Pequod, except that he just loves whales so damn much. If you could talk to Ishmael all those years ago ("never mind how long precisely") before he set foot on the Pequod, would he say the same thing? That he doesn't have anything keeping him on land and that all he wants is to visit some exotic locations and see some whales?

It's possible that Ishmael was an entirely different person before his first whaling voyage, but the way he talks about himself feels so familiar to me -- I know that person, I've been that person. This terrible thing has happened to him, and if you ask him about himself, that's the only thing he can tell you about, even though he doesn't want to say how badly it affected him. But maybe he can't get over it in part because he wasn't doing so great before it happened. He's a guy who clings to his strong opinions and narrativizes his experiences because he doesn't have strong social ties or a real sense of purpose. If he didn't feel so adrift in life, he never would have been in the position where dropping everything for a three-year whaling voyage seemed like a good idea, and now the narrative he built out of that experience gives a new form of structure to his life. Snake eating its own tail, etc.

Fate

One of the major conflicts of Moby-Dick is the tension between predestination and free will. Ishmael is deeply concerned with and ambivalent about the path that someone -- God, the classical Fates, some other grand cosmic being -- planned for him. [3] References to fate are sprinkled throughout the book at major turning points, but most of the references are clustered in the last 40-odd chapters, becoming more and more frequent as the Pequod gets closer and closer to Moby Dick. To illustrate this, I've created a helpful chart. [4]

"Fate" with a lower-case f is the most common word Ishmael uses to describe predestination (17 times), but he also refers to the capital-F Fates quite a bit (6 times). He only uses the word "destiny" twice -- a word which, unlike fate, usually implies a positive or illustrious outcome. "Providence" shows up three times, although once is a reference in dialogue. Some other notes:

• References to the Fates as an entity bookend the story. In the first chapter, Ishmael refers to the Fates as cops and stage managers who maneuvered him into going whaling. In the epilogue, he blames the Fates for giving him a much more specific job: "I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman...the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern." He doesn't say that the Fates intervened to save his life, just that they put him into position to fall out of Ahab's boat.
• The capital-F Fates come up again at the beginning of chapter 47, "The Mat-Maker," in a scene that involves Queequeg and Ishmael weaving a mat for their boat. Ishmael gets real dreamy and metaphorical about it, imagining that he's one of the Fates, weaving destiny out of free will and chance. He's interrupted by the Pequod's first whale sighting of the journey.
• Harrowingly, the only other use of the word "destiny" in the book comes when the Pequod meets the Rachel. Ahab demands to know about Moby Dick's location, while the captain of the Rachel begs Ahab to help search for his son, who was lost in a whale-boat. Ishmael then explains that it's common for Nantucketers to send their sons on whaling voyages at a young age, "to initiate him in the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his race." [5]
• Capital-P Providence comes up in a chapter called "The Monkey-Rope," in which he describes the relationship between a harpooneer and a bowsman in whaling. On the Pequod, a harpooneer like Queequeg is tied to a bowsman like Ishmael, kind of like how a rock climber needs a belayer to hold the other end of their rope. While watching his hot harpooneer boyfriend thrash around and kill a whale, Ishmael meditates on how he's given up his agency in order to merge his fate with Queequeg's -- "for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake." I love marriage.
• Late in the book, the concept of fate becomes closely aligned with Ahab as a character and a force in the story. The crew's "fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate," for example. When Ahab constructs a new harpoon to kill Moby Dick with, Ishmael compares its components -- the pole, the iron barb, and the rope -- to the three Fates. Ahab even refers to himself as "the Fates' lieutenant," utterly convinced that he's destined to slay the whale.

Reviews

• "High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime, without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous." - London Morning Advertiser
• "An ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact...Our author must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius, while they constantly summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise." - London Athenaeum
• "[Readers] must be prepared, however, to hear much on board that singularly-tenanted ship which grates upon civilized ears; some heathenish, and worse than heathenish talk is calculated to give even more serious offence. This feature of Herman Melville’s new work we cannot but deeply regret. It is due to him to say that he has steered clear of much that was objectionable in some of his former tales; and it is all the greater pity, that he should have defaced his pages by occasional thrusts against revealed religion which add nothing to the interest of his story, and cannot but shock readers accustomed to a reverent treatment of whatever is associated with sacred subjects." - London John Bull
• "There is nevertheless in it, as we have already hinted, abundant choice reading for those who can skip a page now and then, judiciously." - New York Albion
• "Beneath the whole story, the subtle, imaginative reader may perhaps find a pregnant allegory, intended to illustrate the mystery of human life. Certain it is that the rapid, pointed hints which are often thrown out, with the keenness and velocity of a harpoon, penetrate deep into the heart of things, showing that the genius of the author for moral analysis is scarcely surpassed by his wizard power of description." - Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
• "Mr. Herman Melville has earned a deservedly high reputation for his performances in descriptive fiction. He has gathered his own materials, and travelled along fresh and untrodden literary paths, exhibiting powers of no common order, and great originality. The more careful, therefore, should he be to maintain the fame he so rapidly acquired, and not waste his strength on such purposeless and unequal doings as these rambling volumes about spermaceti whales." - London Literary Gazette
• "If there are any of our readers who wish to find examples of bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English, we will take the liberty of recommending to them this precious volume of Mr. Melville’s." - New York United States Magazine and Democratic Review

Source.

Gallery

Links

Moby-Dick related content

• The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World
• The story of the Essex
• Studies in Classic American Literature: Moby-Dick
• Pequod (game)
• The original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
• Rep STL: Moby Dick

Similar vibes...

• Point Nemo: the most remote place on earth
• Suicide Narcissus
• The white darkness of Antarctica
• How centuries-old whaling logs are filling gaps in our climate knowledge
• Wikipedia's list of individual cetaceans

Footnotes

[1] Moby-Dick, the title of the book, is hyphenated. Moby Dick, the name of the whale, is not. Love consistency.

[2] The original British edition didn't even include the epilogue, which I'm sure drove the penny dreadful girlies crazy at the time.

[3] While it would be a mistake to read Ishmael as a stand-in for Herman Melville, it's really interesting to peek at Melville's religious background here. Melville's father was a Unitarian, a branch of Christianity that rejects the concepts of original sin and predestination and embraces rationality and free will. His mother and her family were Calvinists, which is about as far away from Unitarianism as you can get while still being Christian. If you know one thing about Calvinists, you probably know that they LOVE predestination and original sin. Melville's father died when Melville was 13, and his mother really threw herself into her faith after that. If that happened to me when I was in middle school, I would probably write an unhinged 136-chapter book about fighting with God's plan too.

[4] The fact that the way I coded this chart is unwieldy and deranged is...uh...thematic.

[5] The race of "people from Nantucket," to be clear.